Just the other day, while watching Deadwood, I pondered what would be on my list of greatest television shows. The aforementioned Deadwood, Twin Peaks, The Flintstones. That’s usually as far as I get.
The Flintstones turn 50 today, which blows my mind because they’ve been with me all my life and they already seemed ancient when I was a kid. I’ve seen every episode many times over, usually over a bowl of Chef Boy-Ar-Dee during lunch break.
The history of The Flintstones stretches back even further than their initial airdate, as this demo shows. I love digging into prehistoric stuff like this, with bold character designs not yet weakened by the vagaries of full-on production. That shot of Barney leaning toward the pool is the bedrock of modern television animation.
Cartoon Brew is reporting that Ward Kimball’s house is up for sale. It makes me just a little sad to see something that was built with so much love being turned into just another bunch of prefab homes.
Ward Kimball was the maverick of the Nine Old Men, with a demeanour that seemed like it would fit in better with the guys at Termite Terrace than it would with Disney. The clip above is an excerpt from the heavily stylized, and mostly serious, Mars and Beyond special that Kimball snuck through when Walt wasn’t looking. It’s a damn shame that Kimball and Wolverton never did a comic together. I would buy Jolly Horrible Comics and Super Impossible Comics in a heartbeat.
I watched a clip from the upcoming Epic Mickey game recently and it inspired me to seek out some old Oswald cartoons. In the game, Oswald has created a retirement community for forgotten Disney characters like Clarabelle Cow and Horace Horsecollar. I have a real affection for black-and-white, rubber hose Disney characters, stemming in large part to Floyd Gottfredson’s Mickey Mouse newspaper strip.
I chose Bright Lights at random, and I think a little bit of Oswald’s luck rubbed off because it’s a lot of fun and more than a little risque. I love the freewheeling nature of these early cartoons. What the characters lack in solid construction they more than make up in flashs of balls-out weirdness. Oswald’s walk at 2:12 seems to come out of nowhere. I can’t remember ever seeing movement so smooth in cartoons of this age. That’s a whole lot of drag on Oswald’s feet. And the gag at 2:45 with Oswald’s ears is fucking awesome. I woud love to work on a project with this kind of style someday.
When your working hours revolve around a particular pursuit, it’s easy to put that interest aside during your free time. I entered the animation field because its history interested me, which is rarely a good idea. Happily, it all worked out, but over the years I’ve spent so much time as a professional I’ve forgotten how to just be a spectator. Upon deciding to get back into watching the masters at work, I realized that it’s been so long that I don’t even know where to begin. So today I’m playing it safe and watching a Looney Tunes short, surprisingly one that I’ve never seen. Apparently racist cartoons were already being scrapped on television when I was a kid.
Frank Tashlin is still one of my favourite Warner Bros. animation directors, but I always have a hard time pinning down why. It all goes back to Porky Pig’s Feat, a phantasmagoria of violence and still one of the strangest cartoons I have ever seen. Scrap Happy Daffy is more sedate, but you can still see some of that strangeness poking through. Tashlin is like a repressed Clampett, with the fleshy close-ups and messy swipes poking out from otherwise stolid animation. Animation’s loss was live-action’s gain.
I spend most hours of the day second guessing the ever changing demands of various supervisors, directors and clients. Everyone has a different idea of what they’d like to see, so the only way to get anything approved is to reduce everything to its most bland, on-model form possible. The worst part is that it’s so easy to give up, fall into a routine, and believe that’s really the best way to animate.
Whenever I start to feel that way I fire up some Jim Tyer, the original madman of animation. Now there’s a guy who had fun doing his job and didn’t care who liked it or not. You might start this video and wonder what I’m going on about, as it’s mostly made up of typical Terrytoon animation, but wait until you hit 1:20 and 3:36. To Jim Tyer, model sheets only ever got in the way.
My only wish is that one day I will be able to animate something as ball’s out crazy as the wolf’s eyes at 1:35.
Note: After hitting play, the annotations in the video can be disabled by clicking the arrow in the lower-right corner and choosing the the top button.
Five years ago I picked up a bunch of public domain cartoons in cheap cardboard sleeves at a dollar store. Since then I’ve watched only a few of the cartoons on these discs, but until now I had avoided the one DVD that most fascinated me; the original Tom & Jerry as produced by the Van Bueren studio.
With its evil, mind-shattering cover, this is the Necronomicon of public domain cartoons. I can’t stop looking at it. My greatest fear was that the cartoons found within could not possibly match the horrifying power of this intern-provided illustration. To my surprise, the first short on the disc met my lofty expectations.
I love the jazzy, urban feel to the East Coast cartoons of the early thirties, best exemplified by the Fleischers, the studio behind Betty Boop and Popeye. The Van Bueren studio couldn’t hope to match their technical virtuosity, but I’ve always enjoyed cartoons that are a little off. Judging by the animation in Piano Tooners, Van Bueren couldn’t keep on-model for more than a few seconds, but damn if the characters’ elasticity doesn’t have a lot of personality. There’s something almost hypnotic about it.
I wouldn’t normally try to push anyone into watching any of these cartoons, but I implore you, at the very least watch the gag that starts at 1:50. The Golden Age of animation was a theatre of pain, and I’ve watched my fair share of cartoon brutality, but that bit with the false note is the most cruel thing I have ever seen in a cartoon.
It dawned on me recently that I don’t really watch short cartoons anymore. It may have something to do with making the transition from 2-D to 3-D over the last few years. Recent changes in my life have led me to embrace my roots once again, and starting tomorrow I will be attempting to watch a theatrical cartoon every day as found in the hundreds of shorts I own on DVD, most of which I have yet to enjoy.
